Thus 11 September, 2001, that dire shock whose collision momentum irresistibly knocked us out of reality as we had understood it — perhaps because we had failed to understand it accurately — and into something terrifying, agonizing, unformed. Maybe Pearl Harbor felt like this, at least to isolationist homebodies who ignored developments in Poland and Manchuria; the American Civil War, calamity though it was, had telegraphed itself for years; sad John Quincy Adams intuited its approach though he died before it came.

And then the little child got a stomach ache; the bomb went off; the South seceded and a pair of hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers. At first we were bewildered. We could not understand “why they hate us”. But in its own time, the new reality grew distinct. It was necessarily grimmer than the old, because we were at war with shadowy murderers to whom we had paid too little attention.

If this were a happier essay, I would write that the shock improved our comprehension of the world, but that isn’t so. Not long after we invaded Iraq in 2003, to confiscate imaginary weapons of mass destruction and punish Saddam Hussein for 9/11, with which he had absolutely nothing to do, the Iraqis whom we were impoverishing, torturing and shooting very naturally began killing ever more of us and each other. In 2004, I was in California’s Imperial Valley, a poorish, agricultural, fairly pro-military place, when I heard people say: “We liberated them, but they don’t appreciate it. We’re trying to help them, but they’re mean.” And why had the 9/11 hijackers been mean? Well, “they hated us for our freedoms.”

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By Tam Hussein

We the Americans (never mind the politicos who got us into this) were the little children who maybe or maybe not should have known better, and 11 September was the ant poison left over from the Cold War. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, that was a vicious atrocity; hence we were right and just to support the Afghan resistance. However, we should not have collaborated with the Saudis on bankrolling, arming and letting loose Islamic extremism. We thought we could stir up the Mujahideen to bleed the “Evil Empire” — which they did — Roger, Wilco, over and out! — but what then? Spent, the Russians withdrew in 1989, while we rested on our laurels.

Right then, when the Afghans were still grateful to Reagan and the CIA, we could have spent a pittance on mosques, hospitals, running water and girls’ schools, and maybe helped to build peace. In Yemen, I have seen schools and clinics labeled “A GIFT FROM THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY”. In 2002, at least (I have not been back since), the Yemenis remembered those gifts. They did not hate the Europeans as they hated us. As for us, buttoning up our wallets, we walked away from the Afghan warlords we had enabled. Once the power vacuum grew literally murderous, the Taliban sprang up, promising to replace robberies, kidnappings and rapes with a literalist Muslim society — an awfully persuasive response to the atheists who had burned women alive and drowned “reactionary feudal elements” in Marxist-Leninist cesspools. What tune were we whistling then? The Afghans had served our turn, so about them we no longer cared a rat’s ass. Now we could crow about a “peace dividend”.

***

Osama bin Laden was a brave and effective Mujahid. Maybe he took our money, or possibly he sucked entirely on Saudiya’s tit. When did leaving him alone with his toys and zealots become imprudent? This ordinary citizen cannot say. But once he commenced uttering explicit threats, meanwhile appearing implicated in terrorist acts, why wasn’t he stopped? Much has been written about the cavalier indifference of the Bush administration, which preferred to look for excuses to “take out” Saddam. The intelligence community itself blamed “the wall” imposed by Congress in the Seventies, after revelations of FBI-CIA collusion in various abuses, including widespread illegal surveillance of American citizens. This partition between spookish entities, we are plausibly told, prevented FBI and CIA cadres from sharing enough information to “connect the dots” and stop the hijackers in time. As the 9/11 report told it, “the wall” now “regulated the manner in which such information could be shared from the intelligence side of the house to the criminal side. These procedures were almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied.” So down came “the wall,” and, to the government’s credit, I will say that there have been no 9/11-sized attacks on American soil since 2001.

Of course, thousands of Middle Eastern civilians have been killed to further that outcome. How many died for no good reason? How many were justifiably tortured? (My answer is none, because I disbelieve that torture is ever justified. But in my magisterial objectivity let me now quote a “CIA veteran” from the other side, circa October 2001: “A lot of people are saying we need someone at the agency who can pull fingernails out… The only question then is, do you want to have CIA people in the room?”.) How many suitcases of hundred-dollar bills have passed out of oversight? What cost have we paid in civil liberties to achieve our tenuous tranquility? I remember the so-called PATRIOT Act, one of whose provisions was that librarians must on request turn over a list of books checked out by a specific patron, and then keep secret from him or her that the list has gone to the government. Ah, freedom; oh, democracy! We citizens gave in and gave up; we left PATRIOTic tricks up to our protectors, because by definition they knew best. But did they? Has the War on Terror been making us more or less safe?

This August, I was reporting from Kuwait, where I found significant hatred of America and Israel. Our stupid, vicious bully of a President goes on exacerbating Muslim hostility with his Iran war, which in Kuwait has increased food prices and triggered retaliatory Iranian drone casualties to people and infrastructure. One man told me that while he did not support Iran “even 1%”, he stood against America “more than a thousand percent.” His position requires a fairly lofty will-to-hate. That is why I see another 11 September coming. Maybe this time it will entail swarms of drones. Meanwhile, we go on making enemies and strengthening their accusations against us. I guess that’s the American way.

As the 11 September report admitted: “Coalition warfare also requires coalition policies on what to do with enemy captives. Allegations that the United States,” to take just one instance, “abused prisoners… make it harder” — who would have thought it? — “to build the diplomatic, political and military alliances the government will need.”

The victims of 9/11  were innocent, and their murderers evil. I am grateful to the intelligence community for killing the killers. As for the waterboarders and blithely careless shooters and detonators (doubtless they are still at it in some “black site”), how can they not make war into a perpetual motion machine? We citizens never know what well-intentioned cruelties they are up to today and tomorrow. And how can we imagine what we cannot see? From Yemen I remember rectangular windows and round windows like kaleidoscopes of multicolored glass, and, in the old city of Shibam in Hadramawt, a cluster of gingerbread or halvah blocks very occasionally ornamented with satellite dishes. My friends and neighbors will likely never go to Yemen. If they ever hear that we dropped a Predator drone over there, that will mean as much to them as learning that we did something classified on Saturn.

The US, we are told, has a representative government. Abe Lincoln called himself our servant, as well he might. Although King Donald takes furious exception, our representatives are supposed to be temporary servants. (Just wait until he makes terrorism great again in his illegal third term!) In Congress and the judiciary branch, decisions made on our behalf are least supposed to be public. As for the executive branch, its purpose, wrote John Adams, is to do whatever must be done with secrecy and dispatch. Obviously, when the Twin Towers fell, the American masses remained in and of themselves unqualified to decide how to react. How many could have distinguished Iran from Iraq, or located Yemen on a world map? How many could say that Saddam was or was not a 9/11 kingpin? So the chief executive decided for America: get Iraq! I do wish he had worked with other world leaders to map out al-Qaeda targets, instead of dragooning his “coalition” into an unjust war based on a lie.

As for his war with Afghanistan, was it effective? Did it gain its purpose? With our military out, and the Taliban inevitably as strong or stronger than before — Americans go on disbelieving in their populist appeal — I can’t exactly applaud Bush’s victory. But maybe we killed a lot of bad guys, and not so many good guys as to create more bad guys than before we started. How can I know? Doubtless he’s proud of his accomplishment.

***

Yes, we Americans remain blind to Yemen, though even an ill-educated ISIS cadre may possess an excellent visual understanding of his sector of Target America; thanks to the internet he might even have soared up the 405 past the Getty Center, exiting at Mulholland Drive to ascend the green coastal hills and then roll down across stone canyons and round the moist green hills with the San Fernando Valley below; there are the enemy’s white houses; perhaps he hates the more expensive ones most; let’s say that he sees Los Angeles as we cannot see Hadramawt, but does he see us, the ones whom he would kill? I remember chatting with some Talibs about Americans. That was how I learned that we are all prostitutes, gang bangers, homeless addicts, perverts pornography addicts; because these men had all worked in the United States, and therefore thought that they knew us; of course the only work they could get was pumping gas in the red light district, selling cheap liquor to alcoholics or manning the counters of “adult” bookstores. No wonder they had a bad notion of us. And no wonder, too, that my neighbors can’t tell a Talib from a Shi’ite from a Sikh. (“Come on, Bill; they’re all ragheads!”) What turban-wearers do they ever see on their screens but America-hating evildoers?

Again I propose that we set aside a fraction of what we burn on surveillance and drone strikes, and spend it on what will benefit people, and make them friendlier toward us. After years of careless carnage and brutality, it will take more years to soften their hearts. But why not build schools? If the Islamists blow them up, build them again. The locals will take eventual note of who seems to be addressing their interests. Otherwise we can “shock and awe”, but then what? We believe in our own kindness, so why not convince them of the same?

At home, meanwhile, we are now proving the Talibs right by spreading libels about non-white, non-Christian immigrants. Texas politicos fulminate about clearing their state of Muslims. Well, then, why shouldn’t Muslim countries cleanse themselves of American military bases?

I wish, here, that American Muslim organizations would more clearly distance themselves from extremists. I wish there could be a place (or, as post-9/11 Americans would say, “a safe place”) for Muslims and non-Muslims to meet, possibly to share food or practice calligraphy (illuminated Qurans are some of the most beautiful works I have ever seen). You see, I am a lucky man. I can wish away without responsibilities, and keep blaming others.

***

The UK has endured a heartbreaking number of high- and low-level terrorist attacks. From my possibly outsider perspective, it seems that many Muslim immigrants have integrated into British society sufficiently to live anonymously, but not enough to feel accepted. Perhaps it is like that in the Algerian neighborhoods of France, the petri-dishes of Belgium and Germany.

My conclusion — an impractical one in my country now that the Bigot-in-Chief is deporting people right and left — is that immigration ought to be managed mindfully. It should benefit both the hosts and the new arrivals. In a better America, a municipality with a shortage of workers might bid to take, say, 1,000 people, in exchange for infrastructure grants or tax breaks. If the new arrivals are Muslim, then an organization such as the Committee on American-Islamic Relations (which somebody in Texas has pronounced terrorist; for my part I am fond of it and its members) could arrange a meet-and-greet, perhaps with some church volunteers, to teach the respective parties that in our country women can wear short skirts (or have sex with other women) and that no one should be forced or tricked into consuming pork and alcohol. Whenever I go to a foreign place, I feel more at ease once I have found a big brother or big sister to teach me the local mores and help me make friends. Why wouldn’t a new immigrant feel the same?

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Meanwhile, one thing I can do right now (as can you) is to reach out to those who seem “other” or even positively alien, before their feelings of rejection render them isolated and estranged. It is the grinding little quotidian incivilities that irritate us into resentment.

Consider the possibilities. We could close our borders, abandon our global capitalist empire to China and Russia and devolve into an autarky. Without cheap imported plastics, rare earths for their cell phones and a committed export market, even the most radical Trumpeter Swans might grow disgruntled then. Or we could isolate and surveil immigrants in hopes of precipitating out the haters. My suspicion is that this treatment would defeat its own purpose. (In 2004, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, 70 to 90% of Iraqi detainees “had been arrested by mistake.”) Or, thirdly, we could welcome them into our community and treat them according to the Golden Rule. Which of these would be easiest, cheapest and kindest?

***

The Pentagon Papers proved that American Presidents were willing to escalate an ever-more-obviously unwinnable war in Vietnam to look tough in elections. As for our 9/11 goon squad — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and that bunch — it might despite warnings from the intelligence community have truly believed that Iraq was behind the attacks Or, perhaps, they simply felt impelled to “do something”, with Iraq already on the “to do” list. Who can say? The executive branch’s necessary Adamsonian qualities of secrecy and dispatch protected it from oversight and embarrassment long enough for Bush II to steer the country into disaster and then step down without fear of punishment.

One of the most serious deficiencies of our rotating representative system is that any chief executive’s theory of foreign policy can suddenly be contradicted and undone by his successor. Just consider the sharp transition from Carter to Reagan, or Clinton to Bush II. And so, returning to the matter of the Afghan Mujahideen, who drove out the Soviets in 1989, we can if we like blame Bush I, who as a former CIA supremo should have understood the necessity for maintaining ties with his proxies and their weapons;.ut we could also point a finger at Clinton, in whose time Afghanistan grew more volatile — why didn’t he re-engage with the people who were still our friends? (A year before 9/11, the Talibs were still in my hearing expressing gratitude to America.) Did anybody in Washington care?

It would be lovely had there been some sage at State and Defense to assure us: “We’ve been following this issue ever since we ramped up the Mujahideen in 1979. Here is how events have evolved, and so our current national interest can be served as follows…” But with the Soviets beaten, and still more so with the collapse of their system in 1991-92, Afghanistan became irrelevant, which is another way of saying that our Afghan policy was ultimately incoherent, like our current Venezuela policy (kidnap the head of state, blow up random fishing boats) or our Iran policy (threaten, bomb, declare victory and repeat).

Our Vietnam policy continued until the Pentagon Papers got leaked. Then it finally began to founder. If and when we are ever relieved of President Trump, some new politician can end the Iran war, or else continue it in some way that is the same only different; then my neighbors will be satisfied, and forget all about it. But the Iranians, Turks, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Omanis, Qataris and Emirates will not forget. Someday we’ll wonder why they hate us.

Sure, she’s “attractively dangerous,” not least to herself. Shouldn’t she have married a Bolshevik after all, or at least reserved her whore-earnings against future cold spells? (“Czechs take Kazan; Archangel shelled by British; cholera in Petersburg”, runs a scene-setting montage.) “Say, Vladimir…” she frets, “you don’t suppose they’ll stop selling French lipstick in Moscow, do you?” With her gold Guerlain pencil now off the vanity table and in her hand, she continues to educate her spouse. “How should I ever get by without it?” Fortunately, she won’t have to. Marienhof being anything but subtle, the reason why she won’t gets foreshadowed on their first post-wedding morning, when the “coverlet severs her head at the shoulders” and “her hair flows like blood” down the pillow, reminding hubby of John the Baptist: “I am as proud and as happy as King Herod.”

Over 130 matrimonial pages later, she rings him up: in five minutes she will shoot herself. Her adorer rushes home, and there she is, awaiting him in bed, jolly and bloody, ha-ha!  (For Cynics, you must admit, is a real laugh.) “‘I imagine I shall be dead by this evening,’ she says… The operation is carried out without chloroform… She struggles to open her eyes and says: ‘Don’t be a cretin… I just can’t stand lying here without any lipstick on… I must be a frightful sight.’”  Then down to death she goes, obedient to the hordes of Red prophets. “Our terror shall not be individual,” says one, “but it shall be a mass terror, a class terror.’” So they divide the bourgeoisie into three categories: liquidate the first, lock up the second and set the third to “menial labor”.

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Olga, in her own way, picks the first. As for the enema-bringer, he may not be as “idiotically romantic’ as we suppose. “I hate my love,” he says, “I would tie a stone weight to its neck and drown it.” Never mind how spoiled she is; both spouses are self-destructive ditherers leeching off capital to which the Revolution is entitled. Sometimes I find them pitiable, but never admirable. Nor is any other character, not even Vladimir’s Bolshevik brother Sergei. So now you know why The Cynics remained unpublished in its native Russian until 1988, when Sovietism was senile and dying.

As for Marienhof himself, though he had fought on the frontline in the First World War, involuntary service for the Tsar hardly impressed the Bolsheviks. About that slaughter Solzhenitsyn remarked: “It isn’t the advancing armies, the fires, and the bombing that make war terrible, it’s terrible mainly because it gives stupidity legitimate power over intelligence.” Cynics takes a comparable view of the Revolution itself: “My brother,” says Vladimir, “had been given as tutors three commanding officers, each one decorated, like most Russian generals, with senility and defeat.” Olga wants to work for the Soviet government, and Sergei wants Olga. Now what exactly can she do for the Revolution? Since she “of course” does not know much of anything, Sergei decides that “in that case, you’ll have to be given a position of responsibility.” The Party was not amused. Cynics first appeared in Berlin in 1928; after 1930, its author would be unpublishable for life.

Worse yet for Marienhof, he was co-founder and core member of the Imaginists, a literary group who instead of accepting that art must follow ideology dared propound that art’s mission is simply to make images. These, in turn, can address each other through literary tropes, as in the best sentences in Cynics:

The stars look as though they have been washed with good-quality perfumed soap and dried with a Turkish towel… The brazen moon sheds streams of cold copper. They have soaked me through… But what does the moon have to do with it?… It’s love that’s to blame…! I spit in its eyes and talk to it like a drunken pimp demanding his nightly receipts from some little trollop.

Doesn’t that make you reach for your enema hose?

Marienhof’s Imaginist colleague and possible lover Sergei Yesenin dedicated works to him. In due course, those dedications necessarily got deleted. For this was, you see, a happy, happy time. Yesenin just happened to be under his own dark cloud. Arrested and rearrested, he kept getting out of trouble, but hanged himself in 1925, with or without the “help” of the OGPU secret police. Doubtless that event failed to brighten Marienhof’s already sunny disposition. But why shouldn’t he give us a chuckle? After giving herself to Sergei, Olga comes home, finds Vladimir sampling Marfusha and says: “Pray don’t go to sleep… once you’ve finished ‘draining the cup of pleasure.’ I’ve brought… new Imaginist poems. We can laugh at them together.”

The communist and fascist movements of the Twenties provoked artistic engagement with mass consciousness. In 1927, following a stimulating but unfulfilling visit to Moscow — his Latvian beloved not being in the mood — Walter Benjamin wrote that the city “reveals a full range of possibilities in schematic form: above all, the possibility that the Revolution will fail or succeed. In either case, something unforeseeable will result… The outlines of this are brutally and distinctly visible among the people and their environment.” In other words, here was a theater for Bolshevism to perform itself in; likewise a laboratory mixing-vessel, school, dungeon and inspiration. The operation will be carried out without chloroform.

In Dziga Vertov’s astounding 1929 film-about-itself Man with a Movie Camera, the masses constitute one animated Leviathan. We follow their frenetic detachments, from dawn to dusk, of a single composite day. Cynics’s very distant cousin, James Joyce’s Ulysses, was a stream-of-consciousness recounting of another single day, in Dublin, in 1904. Comparing that 1922 work to Cynics would be a tedious, slippery endeavor. Let me simply say that this city likewise “reveals a full range of possibilities in schematic form”. Dublin’s parts are concrete, identifiable, while like the characters they stand in for semi-unconscious mythic things.

Andrei Bely’s Petersburg — also 1922 — was set a year later than Ulysses, in allusion to the bloody confrontation between the masses and Tsar Nicholas II. Its doom-ridden, symbol-overgrown weirdness places it in the same genus as Cynics, to which it is much superior. The translators of the edition I own note that Bely is “constantly invoking the gray faceless masses of the metropolis… Ultimately there are no private thoughts or private actions; all are reflexes of larger realities.” Whether Marienhof’s Olga and Vladimir actually generate private thoughts or are merely parodic “reflexes of large realities” is for the reader to decide. (I see them as somewhere between brain surgeons and enema hoses.) In both novels, reality’s playthings sense with dread that “something unforeseeable”, whose onset if not yet its character is “brutally and distinctly visible”, and which will soon overturn the known. “The coffins lined the paths…” writes Bely. “Time sharpens its teeth for everything — it devours body and soul and stone.”

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I should also mention Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), which employed montage in the fashion of Cynics, causing Walter Benjamin to enthuse that this might show literature a new way forward. Like Petersburg, it is a work of a genius, whereas Cynics is a work of mordant promise. That promise might have been fulfilled had Marienhof been better treated. As it is, the book remains worth reading for its patches of Imaginist lyricism.

Now here’s another montage for you, courtesy of Cynics: the district morgue, capacity 12 corpses, now houses 300. Another: in comes official news on “the results of experiments in baking bread from rotten potatoes.” That bread might go divinely with potage à la paysanne, peasant-style soup made from “liquid Smolensky clay and rich black Penza soil.” A horse dies, probably from hunger; Olga consoles the coachman with a bourgeois diamond. Meanwhile the authorities advise the hungry to seek food elsewhere at the expense of class enemies: “Worker! Peasant! To the kulaks’ granaries for bread!” The kulaks were rich peasants. If they were well off, then they must be criminals; war communism was brilliant at quick, cruel solutions.

When that gave way to the New Economic Policy (NEP), which temporarily reenabled small-scale capitalist enterprises, cruelty grew more capricious, not to mention speckled with corruption. Benjamin observed “members of the opposition removed from important posts… countless Jews removed from middle-level posts… The leftist movements which had proved useful during… war communism are now being completely discarded.” As Olga put it: “That most beautiful of mothers is giving birth to a monster.” After her $15,000 NEP-man lover recounts his triumphant speculation in paraffin, Vladimir ingenuously tattles to his brother, who gets the fellow arrested. Olga smilingly feeds her husband one of the NEP-man’s chocolates. And history goes on making progress, like a scalpel in flesh. Another jaunty montage sums up Marienhof’s theme: “There are reports of cannibalism on a mass scale.”

That was when he began his diary: 50 volumes, 14,000 manuscript pages, 69 years. He studied Latin in Holland, became a legate’s interpreter in Russia, whose diplomatic language was fortunately French (he had not yet learned Russian, but would be the only American president who ever troubled to do so); and after jaunting to the Hague, London and France, where his father signed a peace treaty between the United States and His Britannic Majesty, he sailed home and in 1785 was admitted to Harvard. He had gifts, he did.

Copley’s portrait dates from 1796. The subject had become a dour egghead in the Charles Osgood portrait of 1828: balding on top, thickly white-haired from the temples almost down to his naked chin. Old age caught him staring wearily, jowly but still pugnacious at the camera when Matthew Brady took his daguerreotype. The elderly side of the publisher’s box flatters him with the smooth, ruddy baldness of middle age and an almost youthful half-smile, never mind that it is now more tightly accomplished by thinner lips. He was 59, with 40 years to go.

Thus the front and back of his life-box. Within it stand a two-volume selection of his mental remains.

His world is dead, his diplomatic triumphs grown as antique as some oil painting cracked and crazed, his one-term presidency stymied like his father’s, his hopes disappointed, but only provisionally: he being one of those who entrust the future to God. His written thoughts have faded in proportion to their historical context, and his exposition is archaic (Ben Franklin once complained that capitalizing nouns was going out of style in our language, but Adams kept the faith); whenever I tune my eyes to them, they fascinate, then astonish me with true stories of stubborn patience and toilsome courage, for a good cause. There goes Don Quixote Adams again, doing battle with monsters disguised as windmills!

I inhabit evil times. I watch the ruination of my planet and the moral suicide of the nation which Adams sometimes fought against to fight for, and it makes me cynical. Being cynical is not all bad. Sometimes it can be fun. But it is mostly sad and tiring to stop believing in whatever it was I believed in, such as that I could still “make a difference”, or could at least be brave. Both of which remained possible, but with everything around me getting worse so rapidly, it was convenient to pretend that trying to do anything worthwhile would be comical. But then I opened the diaries of John Quincy Adams, and met someone who had also sorrowed over the degradation and oncoming violence in the America he loved.

As David Waldstreicher, the diaries’ present editor, tells it: “Confronted by the implications of American expansionism, Adams found his room for maneuver increasingly narrowed… His speeches and messages during the years of his presidency sought to advance union, ‘improvement’ and good government while carefully stepping over the trip wires of slavery and partisanship.” In my version, Adams finally stepped off the narrow path, bushwhacked into radical compassion and became a hated heroic failure, or if you like a successful practitioner of moral politics. You see, he got sadder, not least on account of his own disappointments — his political defeats, money troubles, his beloved wife’s miscarriages, the stunted or abbreviated lives of several of their children, his two brothers who drank themselves into the grave — and thanks to these losses he could finally revolt against the stench of injustice. So he turned his back on party loyalty, faced the evil thing, took up arms against it and kept fighting it for the rest of his life. I, his reader, know as he could not that we would eventually see his cause as right and righteous. It made headway in his time, and partially succeeded. Sometimes somebody succeeds. Sometimes a dead man’s words can raise me up by proving that it is not too late to do something right.

***

Nowadays we would dub him a “workaholic”: Minister Resident to the Netherlands in 1794, Minister Plenipotentiary to Russia three years later, while his father commenced being President; Senator from 1802 until 1808, when he resigned because his party was about to discard him for anti-Federalist heresies. (Throughout his life, with noble disgust, he declined to put himself forward for office. If asked to serve, he would do it, but never stumped or canvassed.  “In the mean time,” he told his diary, “I implore the Spirit from whom every good descends to enable me to render essential Service to my Country, and that I may never be governed in my public conduct by any consideration other than my duty.”)

In 1809, he returned to Saint Petersburg, where he and Tsar Alexander sometimes greeted each other on the street. Declining an appointment to the US Supreme Court, he stayed in place for Napoleon’s invasion. Meanwhile, the War of 1812 was raging, and the British were invading Detroit. We find him in Paris when Napoleon escaped captivity at Elba and began the Hundred Days: “There was a great crowd of People upon the Boulevards; but the cries of Vive l’Empereur had already been substituted for Vive le Roi.” Then at the Court of Saint James, already balding and careworn, Adams negotiated peace with the British at Ghent. The diaries bring to life his exhausting grind of facing down the old enemy’s resentment and contempt. Adams dug in his heels as stubbornly as would the 20th century’s Molotov. In 1817-25, he became President Madison’s Secretary of State, crafting not only the Adams-Onís Treaty that secured Florida from Spain but also the famous Monroe Doctrine: “You Europeans stop meddling on our territory and we’ll return the favor.” He tried and failed to persuade America to adopt the metric system. His baldness widened and elongated.

Then he became a president aspiring to bless his country with canals and roads, a national university, an academy for the young Navy, an astronomical observatory; but got stymied by his enemies, who reveled in accusing this incorruptible man of corruption. Losing his reelection, he retired just in time for the suicide of the son he had named after George Washington. Unmoved by sneers about his fall from president to congressman, in 1831 he entered the House of Representatives, and in 1844 he became its dean, or longest-serving member. They called him “Old Man Eloquent”. He futilely denounced the Mexican War, and opposed slavery in defiance of censure, execration and threats. He worked himself into ancientness, dying of a brain bleed in the Speaker’s chamber of the House. Don’t pity him; his work was his pleasure. In his mid-thirties, he admits to his diary: “…The interest with which my mind seizes hold of the public business, is greater than suits my comfort or can answer any sort of public utility.”

***

Before I get down to the diaries themselves, please let me compare them to his public speeches, in which he could be bitterly funny, as in these remarks to other Representatives in 1842:

He talks to us about the star of Texas, which he calls “the lone star of Liberty.” Liberty of Texas! The star illumined by the radiance of slavery restored!… [Mexico had recently abolished slavery.] So, I suppose, if war shall come, we shall not only acquire this solitary brilliant star of Texas, but we shall have all Mexico added to the United States. Sir, the Isthmus of Panama will hardly stop our victorious arms, and I really wonder the gentleman did not carry us on to Cape Horn. [A laugh.]. And he means, in this heroic enterprise, to lead on the brave spirits of thousands from the great valley of the Mississippi, inspired by the hope of robbing churches and priests. So it is to be a religious as well as a civil expedition — a sort of crusade, in which the gentleman from Virginia is likely far to transcend the exploits of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan… I look forward to the time when the gentleman’s name shall be placed side by side… with that of a still more glorious conqueror by the name of Tom Thumb. [Roars of laughter, long and loud.]

In distinction to these scintillating razor-cuts, the diaries often come across as melancholy and bitter. John Quincy Adams was so modest that he often disappointed himself. He certainly disappointed others. He and the slave-owning politicos hated one another — and he had a spiteful streak.

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Like his father, he detested Thomas Jefferson, whose assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” sounded phony — for Adams subscribed to republicanism, not democracy. “And that too great an equality of the Citizens, is prejudicial to the Liberty of the whole, the present alarming Situation of our own Country will I think afford us a sufficient Proof.” In other words, he had made up his mind about equality by the time he was 20 — for this diary entry dates from 1786, a year before the Constitutional Convention drafted its mealymouthed allusion to “the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit”, which referred to trafficking slaves from Africa. Though he continued “carefully stepping over the trip wires of slavery and partisanship”, he was, in private, an anti-slavery partisan. That Jefferson was the same in public rendered him to Adams an opportunistic, windy-minded hypocrite. Jefferson prated of emancipation while keeping slaves! In 1802, Adams anonymously published a vicious lampoon about the “sage of Monticello’s” bedroom sports with Sally Hemmings, a woman he owned.

Slavery simply incensed Adams. In 1819, haunted by what he could foresee, he advised the diaries:

His Declaration of Independence is an abridged Alcoran of political doctrine, laying open the first foundations of civil society — but he does not appear to have been aware that it also laid open a precipice into which the Slave-owning Planters of his Country, sooner or later must fall… Jefferson has been himself all his life a Slave-holder, but has published opinions so blasting to the very existence of Slavery, that however creditable they may be to his candor and humanity, they speak not much for his prudence… The seeds of the Declaration of Independence are yet maturing — The Harvest will be what West the Painter calls the terrible sublime.

These words inspire me with dread. I look around me, awaiting the next visitation of the “terrible sublime.” Nobody can stop it now. Maybe no one ever can. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln could not prevent the Civil War even though he promised never to interfere with slavery. Forty-two years earlier, Adams could not prevent it, either. But I love him because he kept trying. More principled in this than gentle, kindly Lincoln, whose heart bled for the slaves but who put the Union first, he wrote in 1820: “If the Union must be dissolved, Slavery is precisely the question on which it ought to break.”

***

I love Jefferson for what he wrote. His trust in people’s power is beautifully radical. When I quote him unattributed on, for example, the desirability of periodic revolts against government, some neighbors tell me that I sound kind of like one of them goddamned Communists. Adams was another radical. Why couldn’t those two have “done something?” His diaries ever so logically reply:

The Declaration of Independence, not only asserts the natural equality of all men, and their unalienable right to Liberty; but that the only just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed. A power for one part of the people to make slaves of the other cannot be derived from consent, and is therefore not a just power.

Adams was still Secretary of State. Like Lincoln, he expressed his anguish but kept it in its place. But remember, Lincoln did emancipate the slaves. To do so, he needed to be elected President. That meant expressing disgust (which might have been unfeigned) at “Negro equality”. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1857, he could always squeeze laughs out of the electorate at the thought of his marrying a Negro wench — no diamond ring for Sally Hemmings! As for Adams, what was he supposed to do about slavery? How could one even talk about it in government? His Southern colleagues could be charming enough on other subjects:

But when probed to the quick upon it they show at the bottom of their Souls, pride and vain glory in their very condition of masterdom — They fancy themselves more generous and noble-hearted than the freemen who labor for subsistence — They look down upon the simplicity of a yankey’s manners because he… cannot treat negroes like dogs.

As we have overheard him confessing, Adams was addicted to politics. He might not have been as ambitious as Jefferson, but then again, maybe he was. In that case he’d better be careful.

***

One of the diaries’ pleasures is watching his empathy grow in private, and discovering that maturation’s public fruits.

He seems to have followed his conscience from the beginning. In 1808, when the Federalists turned him out of the Senate because he supported certain measures of the hated Jefferson, Adams made the following neat dark wormtracks in his diary:

He said my principles were too pure for those with whom I was acting — and they would not thank me for them — I told him I did not want their thanks — He said they would not value me the more for them — I told him, I cared not whether they valued me for them or not — My character, such as it was, must stand upon its own ground, and not upon the bolstering of any man or party —

He opposed female suffrage. And he had nothing against Indian removal, because why should savages remain in possession of all those unimproved forests?

…In repelling an insolent charge of the British Plenipotentiaries against the Government of the United States of a series of perpetual encroachments upon the Indians under the pretense of purchases, I had taken the ground of the moral and religious duty of the Nation to settle, cultivate and improve their territory…

That was in 1814. But by 1839 he had long since woken up to the cruelties contingent on that “moral and religious duty”:

I told them that the case of the Seneca Indians was hopeless. That a fraudulent Treaty coaxed, and bullied and bribed out of perhaps one tenth part of their chiefs and Warriors, was already sweeping them away beyond the Mississippi… I told them it was painful to me… but it was in vain to disguise or suppress the truth. — An inflexible determination to extirpate the race of Indian Savages was the white [man’s] law on the continent, and I feared it would be so till the race itself shall be exterminated from the face of the Earth.

That sounded hopeless. Being unable to “do something”, why did “Old Man Eloquent” not quit? A diary entry explains: “I received two days since a Letter from a Stranger” (a threatening letter, I presume) “advising me now to retire from the world, the only reason for my postponement which is that I cannot afford it.” Well, in fact there was a second reason: “More than 60 years of incessant intercourse with the world has made political movement to me as much a necessary of life as atmospheric air — This is the weakness of my nature, which I have intellect enough left to perceive, but not energy to control.”

As I said, John Quincy Adams was modest — more credit to him. His money troubles and addiction to politics were real enough, but so was his noble pugnacity. In 1831, aged 64, he had braced himself up for doom much as might have Odin awaiting the unconquerable monsters of Ragnarok:

My life has been spent in stemming currents of popular opinions and until lately, with occasional and great success — But the runs of luck in life, are as at whist — The tide in the Affairs of men when it has once begun to ebb, will go down.  This free and bold expression of my opinion which I disdain to withhold will hasten my downward course, and nothing can redeem it — Let me fulfill my destiny; and so far as may be possible sustain my character.

Both of those he did. In 1840 he received petitioners:

The two Seneca Indian chiefs… came this morning… to urge the presentation [against]… the fraudulent Treaty, by which they are to be driven like a herd of swine from their homes to a wilderness west of the Mississippi… I promised to speak for them… I was twice in the Supreme Court library room,… to open a Steam-battery, upon the argument in the case of the Amistad captives — but Oh! how impotent is my voice to fulfill the purpose of my heart!

La Amistad was a slave ship.  Her cargo had risen up, killed most of their tormentors and demanded to be ferried back to Africa. Tricked and captured in America, they were deposited in prison pending their probable extradition to the slavemasters of Spain.

[They] urged me to assume as assistant Counsel… the defense of the Africans captured in the Amistad, before the Supreme Court… — I endeavored to excuse myself upon the plea of my age and insufficiency [for by now Adams was 73]… — But they urged me so much and represented the case of these unfortunate men as so critical, it being a case of life and death, that I yielded,… and I implore the mercy of the Almighty God, so to control my temper, to enlighten my Soul and to give me utterance that I may prove myself in every respect equal to the task —

Please remember that this was the infamous “Taney Court”, whose Dred Scott decision of 1857 would decree that slaves remained slaves even where slavery was not the law of the land. Yet despite that, and despite his age, in February 1841, Adams described in his diary what happened.

With grateful heart for aid from above, though in humiliation for the weakness incident to the limits of my powers, I spoke for four hours and a half, with sufficient method and order to witness little flagging of attention, by the judges or the auditory… The structure of my argument… is perfectly simple and comprehensive — admitting… one fundamental principle,… invoking Justice, specially, aware that this was always the duty of the court; but… an immense array of power,… instigated by the Minister of a foreign Nation has been brought to bear in this case on the side of injustice…

On March 9 Adams “waited upon tenterhooks, half an hour before the meeting of the Court,” until Justice Story pronounced the Amistad mutineers free people. They could go home after all. Meanwhile, Adams was lamenting to his diary: “It is impossible to separate the discussion upon the African slave-trade, from the moral and political aspects of slavery; and that is with us a forbidden topic.”

***

That was literally true. To prove that America honored equality and freedom of speech, in 1837 a Representative from South Carolina introduced the notorious “gag rule”, which prevented all mention of slavery in the House. With the same tenacity he had shown against the British plenipotentiaries at Ghent, Adams punched back for almost nine years. As he wrote in March 1841:

I find impulses of duty upon my own conscience, which I cannot resist, while on the other hand,… the danger, the insurmountable burden of labor to be encountered in the undertaking to touch upon the Slave-trade. No one else will undertake it. — No one but a spirit unconquerable by Man, Woman or Fiend, can undertake it, but with the heart of Martyrdom… Let me but die upon the breach.

So he went on, in April 1841:

The leading men of the North are all truckling to Southern slavery — They are all willing to desert Seward in the stand he has taken [against extraditing three free blacks to Virginia for helping a slave run away]. I see what it will cost me to stand by him, but I have so little political capital left, that the remnant is not worth saving — Especially at the cost of base desertion from the cause.

And again, on 18 January, 1842:

I presented the petition of sundry citizens of Massachusetts praying that the benefits of the naturalization Laws may be extended to persons of color — [Virginia Representative Henry] Wise made objection to its reception…

On 24 January:

. . . And I presented sundry other petitions — One from Benjamin Emerson of 45 others of Haverhill, Massachusetts, praying Congress, to take measures for peacefully dissolving the Union [so that Massachusetts would be no longer slavery-stained]…. — I moved its reference to a select Committee with instructions to report an answer assigning the reasons why the prayer of the petition should not be granted — Then came another explosion, and after snarling debate a Resolution offered by Thomas W. Gilmer, that I deserved the censure of the house…

The next day:

At one Gilmer’s resolution of censure upon me was taken up — Thomas F. Marshall offered a much more violent one with a flaming preamble, charging me… with subornation of perjury and high treason… I finished [my reply] and was followed by Henry A. Wise, [who] in a speech of personal invective against me took nearly two hours…

And on into the following month. Here’s an excerpt from 4 February, 1842:

I occupied the whole of this day in continuing my defense before the house [of Representatives] —… I specially refuted the pretence that the Union could be dissolved only by force, and cited the example of the peaceful dissolution of the confederation Union, by the present Constitution of the United States.

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Thomas Pynchon's world of shadows

By William Vollmann

Two days later, Adams wrote:

One hundred members of the house, represent Slaves, four fifths of whom [that is, of the members] would crucify me, if their votes could erect the cross — forty members representatives of the free in the league of Slavery and mock democracy, would break me on the wheel if their votes or wishes could turn it round — and four fifths of the other hundred and twenty are either so cold or so lukewarm, that they are ready to desert me at the first scintillation of indiscretion on my part.  The only formidable danger with which I am beset is my own temper.

On 7 February, the Representatives wearied in their persecution and tabled a motion to censure Adams. Yet his enemies weren’t done yet. In May 1842, he described receiving:

…from the South almost daily letters of insult, profane obscenity and filth… Threats of Lynching and Assassination are the natural offspring of Slave-breeders and Slave-traders…

In September, he had attracted the ire of an even greater foe.

I have now on hand a controversial warfare with John Tyler, President of the United States; bitter personal hatred of five of the most depraved, most talented, and most influential men of this Country, four of them open and undisguised…

In October:

I have deliberately assumed an aggressive position against the President, and his whole executive Administration — against the Supreme Court of the United States, and against the commander in chief of the army — I am at issue with all the organized powers of the Union — with the twelve hundred millions of associated wealth, and with all the rabid democracy of the land… But my cause is the Cause of my Country, and of human liberty. It is the cause of Christian improvement — the fulfillment of the prophecies, that the day shall come when Slavery and War shall be banished from the face of the Earth.

1843 would begin with Adams — now in his 75th year — promising legal advice to one “George Lattimer, arrested and claimed as a slave”. The very next day, a certain Moses Bell, having sued his master, was declared free by an all-white jury, after which the master appealed to the Supreme Court. Adams again “promised to do for him what I could.” Next came John Davies, whose wife’s son Joseph Clark was promised by his master that on the latter’s death he would work three years for a brother, then be freed. But the brother sold him, “and he is now in irredeemable Slavery for life… — Can I not possibly do something for this man?”

***

On December 3, 1844, Adams moved that the gag rule be rescinded. “The question was then put on the resolution and it was carried 108 to 80 — blessed ever blessed be the name of God!” He finally died, aged 80, in February 1848. He never did see the light when it came to women’s suffrage, and it would surprise me to learn that he desired full social equality for African Americans (his satire against Jefferson and Sally Hemmings had a racist tinge.) He was, then, of his time — yet better than his time.

Let me leave you with one more of his sayings:

I believe the best guard against prejudice is a frequent examination of our opinions, and a cool estimate of the arguments opposed to them — You must as Cicero says identify yourself in imagination, first with your adversary and then with your judge — and above all you must have resolution to abide by the result even if it should be adverse to your preconceived opinions.

Ever since his first novel V. came out in 1963, Thomas Pynchon has been a master architect of the “and so forth,” and we can count on him to roll pineapples and memos underfoot along the path to it. I remember from my teenaged years trailing after Mrs. Oedipa Maas in bewildered joy through that mirror-walled prison maze The Crying of Lot 49, then essaying Gravity’s Rainbow, whose hero Tyrone Slothrop was “obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name on it,” hence with meticulous dream-logic kept unconsciously calling Nazi V-2 rocket-bombs down on the sites of his recent, well, you know. 

As for the mysterious heroine of V. … — but like Pynchon himself, I digress, if not quite all the way to the haunted castle called And So Forth. The point is that you and I, caught up in Shadow Ticket, his latest novel, are now in Milwaukee, 1932, with another blizzard of pineapples about to fall, Prohibition still in hypocritical force and Al Capone’s heirs blowing up the competition. Although every now and then some sage may see fit to remark that “this caper’s got German storm kiddies written all over it,” for next year Hitler will become Chancellor, and he has sympathizers right here in the American heartland (if you don’t believe me, try bowling at New Nuremberg Lanes, where the doggerel is a cheerfully, idiotically vicious as anything out of Gravity’s Rainbow: “Hold yer flag up high, yeahh, / Let’s swing it, for the Nah-zis—”) — yep, dear old 1932! 

Our protagonist will be Hicks McTaggart, who for money used to crack strikers’ heads, because “at the time in Wisconsin not a week went by there wasn’t a strike at least being voted on someplace, plenty of opportunity to kick asses on behalf of management,” so that Hicks almost resembled one of Adolf’s Brownshirts, except that they kick ass gratis, for righteousness’s sake. Well, Hick surprised himself by getting softhearted. And rather like Slothrop not (consciously) knowing the baleful power of his penis, Hicks simply felt relieved when his sap somehow misplaced itself (nothing to do with him) just before it would have split some little Bolshevik’s skull. So he became a private eye. Now won’t that be just the ticket?

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You can’t steal a Cossack’s soul

By William T. Vollmann

His boss was a cards-to-his-chest type named Boynt Crosstown — and here I admit to having dropped that in as the merest excuse to revel right now in more of Pynchon’s christenings: Dr. Swampscott Vobe, Wisebroad’s Shoes, Connie McSpool, Glow Tripworth de Vasta, Cousin Begonia, “child sensation Squeezita Thickly” — for this author’s longstanding genius there on that private swivel chair of the Department of Character Appellations matches long-gone Lord Dunsany’s for imaginary gods and cities. I cast my grin back upon Tyrone Slothrop, who was first printed in 1973, and wonder to what extent my delight in Shadow Ticket derives from nostalgia. For I’m getting decrepit, while Pynchon is even older, so which will come first, the old lion’s last roar, or my last read? Enriching the nostalgia is Pynchon’s lyrically sad and squalidly beautiful Milwaukee, a place to which I have no connection, and at a time before my parents were born, so why should I care about it? But I do, because it’s a shadow Milwaukee, all the more worth missing for being unreal. 

There is a gentleness to Pynchon, and sometimes even a cynical sweetness (and so forth); then come prankish pineapples. We may discover ourselves “haunting given stretches of sidewalk just as the shops close down and the girls come out dazy and chattering, cigarette smoke and the slowly more intensifying light of the evening street” and believe in what we see, but what about when two fortune-telling penny scales in a row print out consistently insistent bomb warnings about the Christmas package received by Hicks from two of Santa’s elves? 

We can now commence tiptoeing or maybe goosestepping over bowling balls and rolling pineapples on the way to the “and so forth”. For this, you see, is a genuine “Milwaukee bildungsroman, as they call it locally” — I just bet they do. And there are many ways to get in trouble in Milwaukee, so why on earth would Hicks ever want to depart? But what happens in Milwaukee does not infallibly stay in Milwaukee, because Boynt Crosstown has handed him that real lulu of a ticket, whose invisibly inked purport reminds me of a certain refrain: “… oh get away / from me, you — /ol’ mid- / night… in Milwaukee…” Hence halfway through this thumb’s thickness of smooth, sly pages, Hicks will be glumly making the best of interwar Europe.

Reader, what gives you your get-up-’n’-go? Are you a Jane Austen character hunting for marriage, a money-starved Dreiser protagonist, a Thucydidean demagogue, or would you rather get your love ticket punched? In Shadow Ticket there will be dancings, rubbings, copulations, flirtations, and yet we are far from the romantic mystifications of V.: Hicks’s heart does ache, but it’s more jealous than committed. In short, the motive power of his personal narrative, however greased up by dalliances, will not be his dancehall girl April Randazzo, because not only does he stay uncommitted, but the gangster Vumvum soon breaks it to him that she is the willing moll of a mobster titan. And if you still hope against hope that Shadow Ticket will turn into Love Story, let Vumvum set you straight: “Padrino, this far down the chain nobody gives ungazz about that emotional stuff.” — April stays behind to marry Don Peppino. What snatches Hicks out of Milwaukee is that lulu of a work ticket from Boynt Crosstown. And the pineapples roll. Sometimes they detonate.

To maintain narrative suspense I have sworn not to tell you that Hick’s not-quite-friend Stuffy Keegan has recently escaped gangsterous assassins thanks to an Austro-Hungarian U-13 submarine that snuck in beneath the midnight ice of Lake Michigan, which disappearing act a certain ominous new breed of policemen inexplicably threatens to blame on Hicks himself. Hence he accepts Boynt Crosstown’s dragooning of him into returning to her fiance and Mommy (Daddy being on the lam) Daphne the Airmont cheese heiress, whom Hicks once rescued from a mental asylum. Now this may be tricky to close out, because she would rather be in Europe with her mercurial boyfriend. Boynt does hint at a potentially generous expense allowance. He further advises Hicks to “better just be yourself — with you, not the perfect option, I agree…”

Well, so off goes our hero to the Airmont mansion, in what is almost a quasi-semi-parody of noble gumshoe Philip Marlowe meeting his fat cat employer at the beginning of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and in both books we know everything will become more sinister and complicated, because that’s what all discerning readers demand. Here for instance is one of Shadow Ticket’s complications: Cheese turns out to be “self-aware… maybe not exactly the way we are, but still more than some clever simulation… Long-time spiritual truth in Wisconsin”. And coincidentally, Daddy Airmont, forenamed Bruno, is “known in the industry as the Al Capone of cheese”. A Viennese policeman (who might be something else) refers to him “the way Dracula pronounces the name Van Helsing”. I am sorry to say that the battles and extortions of the Internationalist Cheese Syndicate run out of laughs, as do such easy digs at Nazi “culture” as “an unremitting suite of Wagnerian works transcribed for zither”.

But those are my only cavils with Shadow Ticket, and having made them I had best hasten on by padding out this essay with plot summary: drugged in New York, poor Hicks wakes up on an ocean liner bound for Europe, about which place one of his fellow passengers and mysterious keepers inspires him as follows: “With the old lot on their way out, there’s a second chance, not only for Germany but for all civilization.”

“Routine ticket, only over here for as long as it takes, till everything’s back to normal.” “OK, maybe this ticket is takin’ longer than it should, but that don’t mean—” Sorry, Hicks, but oh yes it does: routine ticket, runaway heiress ticket, extra ticket, unknown ticket, fishy ticket, shadow ticket…! “Still trying to keep on with it before it gets too dark.” Another secret I promised not to tell you is that pretty much every Pynchon novel entails cruises to and from Shadowland, as in the very first pages of The Crying of Lot 49: “I think it’s time Wendell Maas had a little visit from The Shadow.” If you distrust ambiguity and are masochistic enough to read this author regardless, why, sure, he knows how to project bright stillness, just to trick you — imagine an interrogation cell, or maybe a superego’s lightbulb glaring inflexibly in the prison of your very own frontal lobe —: “a good enough vision,” says Gravity’s Rainbow, “of what’s shadowless noon and what isn’t”. But noons never last very long for the hag-ridden victim of a shadow ticket. As Gravity’s Rainbow has it: “So much has to be left behind now, so quickly.”

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Pynchon passes out shadow tickets left and right, just as God does, because that’s how life goes, right? We all long to know what the rules are, in order to stay out of trouble by following them or else get ahead by breaking them. For instance, why did those two sleazy Christmas elves present Hick with a ticking package? — “In the business,” a bomb-cooker explains, “we understand that an explosive… is actually somebody with something to say… a message we aren’t so much receiving as overhearing” — because had Hicks been exploded, the message could hardly have been to him (no more Hicks to receive it) but about him. But what is it? It garbles itself, on purpose, or maybe gets parasitized, à la William Burroughs, by unimaginably alien cipher-mongers, and so the shadowless noon turns shady, then as opaque as cuttlefish ink; until, just as in the very last sentence of V. the Mediterranean Sea “showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day,” namely THE END, so Hicks McTaggart sleepwalks blind in blackness, wondering where the next pineapple will catch him. What can he do but keep pretending compliancy? 

To cope with alogical, amoral and possibly inescapable shadow tickets, The Crying of Lot 49 advises “silence, impersonation, opposition masquerading as allegiance,” which will be Hicks’s exact way of getting by in Europe’s fear-spiced “desire for what has almost arrived… [in] a long erotic buildup before the shuddering instant of clarity, a violent collapse of civil order which will spread from a radiant point in or near Vienna,” which I take to mean Berlin. The foreplay includes a kind of paranormal pre-Cold War between Nazis and Soviets, while Ustasha terrorists and Hungarian Jew-killing “Vladboys”, “small, nimble, predatory, full of pep”, operate between Pynchon’s lines. 

Meanwhile, where the hell are we? In a line which could have been lifted from Philip K. Dick retails the possibility of getting “thrown by some occult switchwork into an alternate branch line…, where Stalin and crew are no longer possibilities…” It almost seems as if this could happen to anyone, even you and me! What if it did? Lot 49 ends with Oedipa Maas still waiting for answers, Gravity’s Rainbow with another rocket about to come down on us, and in V. we never find out for certain who V is; while right back here in Shadow Ticket, when the cheese monster Bruno Airmont gets kidnapped onto Stuffy’s submarine so that he can be safely exiled instead of bumped off, they take him to a New York whose Statue of Liberty has become now someone else. “It’s the U.S. but not exactly the one you left. There’s exile and there’s exile.” That sounds slightly unnerving but not necessarily worth dreading, for at least we’re not trapped in William Burroughs’s Ticket That Exploded. 

The bottom line is that Hicks McTaggart’s Milwaukee is hopelessly far away. Fortunately, when hailed by Stuffy Keegan’s submarine he was informed, maybe even guaranteed, that thanks to some “swell beer joints”, the home base of Fiume (AKA Rijeka) is “the Milwaukee of the Adriatic”. Anything can happen in one Milwaukee or another, maybe even something good, for even “as Hicks begins to understand that he’s not going back to the States right away,” Pynchon gives him one lulu of a ticket, because his ever closer friend Terike starts teaching him Hungarian, which necessarily involves kissing lessons.

By my semi-tendentious definition, the Cold War, or at least something cold-ish, began shortly after the Russian Revolution, when Allied interventionists — British, French and Americans — supported “White Guard” anti-Communists in the Civil War, which Lenin won; but his victory was the merest brooding pause. How could there be reconciliation, with our gameboard’s Slavic sector so lurid with starvation, executions, disease? Failing to export Bolshevism to Ukraine and Poland, and suffering economic punishment by the West, Russia postponed “permanent revolution” in favor of “socialism in one country,” and became a fortress besieged. Sooner or later, both sides agreed, the whole world must go capitalist or Red. Against each other they played proxy matches for some 75 years, until the USSR fell in 1991-92. Then we threw a dust cover over everything and went upstairs to start new games.

Shokokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don takes place mostly from 1911 through Tsarism’s trench war suicide of 1914-17 and the resulting fratricide of 1917-20. The book was published in serial form from 1928-40 — at one point Stalin’s permission was required before publication could proceed. At its heart is the fictional (and tragically contested) Don Cossack village of Tatarsky.

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Sholokhov, himself, was born in a place like this in 1905. His father was Russian, and his mother a Cossack’s Ukrainian widow. At age 13 the boy became a fighting Red. “Not everyone who lives through terrible times can transform them into art,” remarks his editor-translator, who praises the novel for “a very special authenticity”. And if you would like to know exactly how terrible those times were, let me quantify: during the Civil War, nearly half of the Don region’s inhabitants died, fled or were driven away.

Amidst such dueling mannequins of take-charge citizenship as John Galt and Gladkov’s Comrade Gleb Chumalov (“Comrade Gleb” to his estranged wife) canters bravely brutal Grigory Melekhov, Quiet Flows the Don’s main character. He’s Don Cossack almost through and through; for his grandmother was a Turkish war bride, pregnant with Grigory’s father when the neighbors trampled her to death on suspicion of witchcraft; “and the village acquired its breed of hook-nosed savagely handsome Melekhov Cossacks or, as they were commonly called, ‘Turks.’” 19th century critics might have made much of Grigory’s “mixed blood” when interpreting his personal and political changes of alliance — too many of those to summarize.

For in this truly named “Soviet Gone with the Wind” he will commence a scandalous liaison with Aksinya, the wife of his fellow woman-beater Stepan Astakhov (her charms include a “shift rucked above the knees and her legs, white as birch-bark and parted unashamedly”), before he breaks off with her for a parent-appeasing marriage with Natalya Korshunov, who adores him and whom he pronounces frigid, returns to the irresistible Aksinya. With her he sets up housekeeping in a rich landowner’s employ, gets conscripted into the Great War, “and all of them together, young Cossacks uprooted from their villages, in the atmosphere of death and destruction that followed them, were already wilting and changing like stalks of mown grass” — as Aksinya gets drafted into putting out for the young master of the house — while for Grigory it will be conscription all the way!

See him for instance frogmarched into useless battles, inveigled into Redness until that side’s cruelty makes him defect to the equally slaughter-happy Whites; briefly allured by the idea of a Cossack Republic, not to mention re-conscripted I don’t know how many times — and a stellar fighter he is! — hunted out of his home (“a distant relative of the Melekhovs, a hospitable Cossack, hid Grigory in a stack of dried dung fuel”) and on it goes: pursuing and being chased, promoted, proscribed and simply outlawed… for, by now, he has killed old neighbors, former friends. “Indeed,” says Montaigne, “what are we but sedition and discrepancy?”

From an orthodox Bolshevik standpoint, Grigory therefore deserves a bullet. As for Cossacks in general, well, they were renowned as the Tsar’s cavalrymen, who did great service in 1812 against Napoleon and rode down peaceful demonstrators in the year of Sholokhov’s birth, so why would ruthless Red revolutionaries trust them? Had the frontline not kept jittering back and forth, and had there been less requisition, rape, indoctrination and murderous shattering of families — oh, and had neither dekulakization nor forced collectivization impended — the Cossacks might have caused less trouble for their alternating overlords. But Tatarsky, like Aksinya herself, goes on changing occupiers; so that Grigory, who by now would just as soon live quietly with his true love, loses her again and again.

I’d hazard he has also lost himself — sedition and discrepancy! One of his White Guard subalterns derides him as “something like a Bolshevik” because he takes umbrage that the officers “look down on you. But from their point of view they’re right… Even though you wear officer’s insignia, you have remained… an uncouth, unpolished Cossack… You blow your nose with the help of two fingers.” — To this he good-humoredly replies: “Just you wait. One day I’ll go over to the Reds, and then I’ll be as sharp as steel… I’ll rip the guts out of you, heart and all!” — So is he inclining Sovietward? Hardly! — “I’ll tell you this, good woman, your son Grigory has turned out to be the worst enemy of Soviet power. When we cross over to that side, he’ll be the first to get a rope round his neck.” The speaker (what a charmer!) then sets fire to seven reactionaries’ houses. “Below him in Tatarsky a sparkling ruddy foxtail was flaring against the slate-black sky.”

In Gladkov’s Cement, which follows the Orthodox line, leading cadres and their non-Party herd must beat off an attack by Cossacks on their cement factory. Comrade Gleb bags one such troublemaker, who turns upon us the “ferocious, bloody eyes of a trapped animal. His eyes were darkened with fear and deadly hatred.” But even Gladkov must allow the Cossacks their courage: the captive “whooped, as the Cossacks do at riding displays,” then jumps over a convenient cliff, because that’s just how they are, you see. 50-odd pages later yet another lot of “bearded Cossacks” will be “coming in a horde, grinning like man-eaters, with whoop and yell and swords empurpled with blood. The Cossack villages would release their thousands to come on across the land like a swarm of locusts…” Somehow they do not sound much like the hard-working, home-loving, insular people described by Sholokhov.

In Quiet Flows the Don, then, Cossacks are grubby, lice-ridden, stingy, greedy, xenophobic, quarrelsome, lustful to the point of rape (Natalya got deflowered by her own father); but unless “mobilized” by Red or White coercion they would rather bring the hay in than “come on across the land like a swarm of locusts.” Here is a certain unwilling locust named Grigory; it is 1914; he has just lanced his first Austrian and sabred his second: “His steps were fettered and heavy, as if an insupportable load had been placed on his shoulders; disgust and bewilderment were crushing his spirit.” Year after year the disgust goes on.

The loved ones fell on all sides, the red Cossack blood flowed, and eyeless in sleep from which there is no awakening, they rotted while the guns thundered their funeral dirge in Austria, in Poland, in Prussia. Even the East Wind could not carry the mourning voices of their wives and children to their ears. The flower of Cossack manhood left its homeland and perished out there amid the slaughter, the lice and the horror.

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By Mary Gaitskill

Menaced for telling the truth in Book III about Red repression of the Don Cossacks, Sholokhov (who I must reiterate was sincerely Red) paused to write Virgin Soil Upturned, a novelistic hosannah to the collectivization forced on these same people. He may have believed in the activists’ progressive intentions, or hoped to believe, or composed this tale to save himself from the Gulag. Meanwhile he bravely denounced torture and murder where he saw it, and got two of the cruelest cadres arrested. He was then “encouraged” to turn Quiet Flows the Don‘s protagonist into a Red John Galt.

In a personal letter he confided: “I simply cannot make Grigory into a Bolshevik… Let [the bigshot editor] Fadayev… not go on trying to prove to me that ‘the law of artistic production demands such an ending or else the novel will be objectively reactionary.’”

In a private argument with Stalin, Sholokhov courageously insisted that a counterrevolutionary such as General Kornilov could still be “‘subjectively’ honorable when seen as a member of his own class.” It is for this that I favor Quiet Flows the Don above all other Cold War chesspieces; for once we claim that no group who asserts what we despise can possibly be honorable, we make violence against its members less unthinkable. And why? Grigory for his part has no choice but to fight. His “class analysis” is unsteady; you see, he has other interests, such as “the brownish sweat-faded circles under the arms” of Aksinya’s blouse; “his eyes followed every movement.”

How long the discussion continued and how close Sholokhov came to being arrested nobody knows. But Stalin let him have his way.

He finished his masterpiece at the end of 1939, supposedly on Stalin’s birthday. The Nobel Prize came to him in 1965.

In 1969 Pravda declined to continue serialization of his novel about the Second World War on account of its mention of purges, labor camps and Stalin’s military mistakes — another reason to honor that brave and honest Communist Mikhail Sholokhov.

And was he brave or honest in denouncing Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich? He did whatever so many cadres did, “taking a stand” against writers in bad odor. This has exactly been remembered to his credit. He might have merely been politically stupid, in company with my American neighbors who declined to see our Iraq War as a crime — for it is easy enough to live with repression when we do not see it, and especially when it is applied to people we have never met. (Quiet Flows the Don achieves much of its tragic power because the killers know their victims personally, as did a certain victim or perpetrator named Sholokhov — who unlike Solzhenitsyn escaped a Gulag sentence.) Anyhow, who won’t be enthused about repression if it accords with our Party line? Quiet Flows the Don does not enthuse. It sees both sides.

He ranted against Pasternak and other dissidents, for which I might call him ignoble, complicit — but how badly was he pressured and how much did he understand in his pampered, drunken old age out there in his Don village? (Steinbeck went from being a champion of Okies to a supporter of the Vietnam War. Heinlein was a former socialist who campaigned for the Right-winger Bob Dole.) Sholokhov took a stand, made enemies and was accused of toadyism. But was he a toady of the Whites, the Soviet establishment, neither or both?

He got smeared for plagiarism — first by Stalinists for whom Grigory was insufficiently Red (had some reactionary militarist written this trash?), later by supporters of the intellectuals to whose persecution he gave public approval. In Ukraine, thanks to Putin’s continuing rape of that country, every Russian cultural figure from Solzhenitsyn to Pushkin to Tschaikovsky is officially malodorous, so I was hardly surprised when an amateur literary historian assured me that Sholokhov was not only a plagiarist but also that his great work was no better than wastepaper.

A professional literary expert then explained that he could not have written Quiet Flows the Don; her candidate for authorship was Andrey Platonov, whose work I know well enough to love. To my mind it is far too dreamlike and formally inventive to be Sholokhovian. Well, well. It makes sense that Ukrainians would despise a Stalinist whose masterpiece was composed even as Stalin deliberately starved to death Ukrainian peasants by the millions. And so Stalinists and anti-Stalinists alike go on calling this great author a literary thief, although no one has proven any such thing.

Now that all the authors mentioned in this essay are dead, what most matters about them is what they wrote.

Ostrovsky’s novel, like its Soviet cause, has decomposed nearly to irrelevance. Gladkov could write well enough. His portraits of hard-charging Communists in Cement make the mentality of that time vivid, comprehensible and even estimable whenever it is not abhorrent. Some of Heinlein’s science fictions are still ideologically coherent, but dating rapidly. Rand’s Atlas Shrugged retains its followers, some of whom just got their man back into the White House. Its mild racism, patriarchal gender norms, exaltation of luxury-loving tycoons and contempt for the poor remain in favor here in the United States.

Of all these, Quiet Flows the Don is the most alive. Like them, it is a political screed, an entertainment and a moving (horribly sad) depiction of people trying to survive within a whirlwind they barely understand. Yet unlike them, in its combination of specificity and universality, its unsentimental compassion and brilliant verisimilitude, the book deserves comparison with its sunnier cousin War and Peace.